Answering Dr. Krugman

I read Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times frequently. I've long been an admirer of his, ever since he openly disputed George Bush's rationale for our ill-fated incursion into Iraq.

Today, he had a column about the growing worthlessness of a college education. He's right though I didn't think his analysis went far enough. So I sent my first letter to the editor of the Times today. It' a long shot that they'll print it so I thought I would give it space here.

To the editor:

Years ago at a social gathering, I got into a convesation with a Boston-based psychiatrist. We were talking about the subject of addiction treatment when I was startled to hear him say: "You know, we can't afford to win the war on drugs."

When I questioned his assumption, he replied: "Think about all the people who would lose their jobs if we won the war on drugs: rehab center staff, addiction treatment specialists, prison guards, the police, large swaths of the legal system. It just goes on and on."

I think about that conversation whenever I hear or read some politician or opinionator decry the demise of some large societal system or another. Which brings me to Paul Krugman's column in the NYTimes on Monday.

While I agree with Dr. Krugman's analysis, I don't think he went far enough. At this point, our country has more colleges and other institutions of higher learning than any other time in our history. And every one of those institutions has a vested interest in maintaining "the pathway to wealth is based on a good education" mythology.

Think of all the people with a vested interest in keeping education just as it is: teachers and professors, the fundraisers, the endowment babysitters, the alumni magazine staffs, college administrators, and the loan shark industry that preys on young people and their families with the hollow promise of what a good education brings.

Think I'm wrong? The burden of debt now carried by most recent college graduates ensures they will be debt slaves for decades after they graduate from the institutions of higher learning that promised them jobs in exchange for loans they couldn't afford to pay back. To me, the point of most higher educational institutions has become the maintenance of their own existence at the cost of the financial misery of their students.

Reform education? Not a chance, not while there are too many people invested in maintaining the now false promise of the rewards of a good education. 

Getting Back to the Greening of the Earth

These diminutive coral bells flutter high above their leaves.

This cranesbill was a new addition to my garden last year, a gift from a gardening friend.

These crocuses are among the first flowers to come up in my garden.
I always wish they lasted longer.

My yard has become so shady, I'm contemplating not growing veggies this year, for the first time.
But I would miss my lemon cucumbers.

From my perspective, you can never have too many narcissus.

These daisies pop up in the most unlikely places. This little one
grew between rocks down by the river.

A Case of the Slights

We are deep into the transition from winter to spring, the time of year I call "the womb of the world." The overarching theme here is wet. The crust on top of the snow is soft and crystallized. If you step on bare ground, the action is accompanied by a squishy sound. After a half dozen snowballs thrown for Goldie, you could wring water out of my gloves.

Yep, wet.

I hear whispers of spring from my cousin in Virginia who reports greenery stretching up from the earth. My sister on Cape Cod espied the tops of a few bulbs popping up in the garden closest to her house.

Me? I can't see my mailbox from the house because the snowbank on the corner of the driveway is still taller than I am.

All of this change puts the virus world on high alert. There are flus and colds that need to be freed to plague the human world. Which is why I think I have a case of the slights—a slight sore throat, slight achiness, slight headache, and fatigue that saps my enthusiasm for much.

I am hoping the flu shot I got back in the fall gave me some sort of blanket protection. I'm not good at being sick. So I'm down in the quilt studio playing with fabric with at least three—no, make that four—design ideas dancing in my head. Not sure which one will win but I am so not giving into a case of the slights. I may go to bed early but I am not giving in.

Do you hear that virus?!? Ha, another cup of ginger tea and an orange in your face!

Walking Heads

I think I may have mentioned in this space that I spent a great deal of time crocheting this winter. I craved short-term projects that needed some design so the thought process was minimally engaged.

But most of all, I needed to feel yarn in my hands.

There are eight hats here, all of my own creation. They all have their initial impetus in one of the worst crochet patterns I think I've ever found. It's from a booklet I've had tucked away among my crafty stuff for years. It's for a simple hat made of half-double crochet stitches.

I made a prototype from scrap. It was a bomb. But it sparked the idea for these hats. Another book inspired the topknots that decorate these creations.

So I experimented—different-sized needles, different yarns, different combinations of yarns, ways to handle the topknot—and I was off.

The first half dozen of these went to the clothing shelves of our local homeless shelter, the Upper Valley Haven. Ever since, I've called these hats Haven Hats.

I've been waiting all winter for the right combination of snow texture (meaning it would hang together in snowballs) and lighting so I could plop these babies on top of a team of snow people. Yesterday, Jay took the initiative to fashion these heads. It was his idea to add the scarves, and he took the initial pictures of my creations for the cover of a pattern book I'm planning for these simple, versatile head toppers.

I thought his idea really worked, and I'll be outdoors doing more photos this morning because we're getting rain sometime later today which means my walking heads will start to disappear.

But aren't they fun?

A closeup of one of the original Haven hats so you can see the topknot better.

This is the prototype made from scrap yarn following the pattern that eventually inspired
my Haven Hats. Looks like something the Cat in the Hat would make, doesn't it?

Mosaic Report—An Update

Jay has been spending a lot of time in my office lately. Yeah, he does like my company but I'm not the main attraction here. He's making a wall-long mosaic out of tiles he rescued from a building developer.

Like many people, neither Jay nor I can throw away "good stuff." Of course, everyone's definition of good stuff is different. For me, it's paper and fabric and yarn and boxes and baskets and cool jars. For Jay, it's moldings and different woods and windows and tools and really wonderful tile that would have been thrown in the landfill if he hadn't rescued it.

We've used some of his tile to do the wall in our shower and the floor in our bathroom and many of the surfaces in our kitchen. In every case, Jay's creativity has conquered the "little bit of this and little bit of that" state of his inventory.

By the time he got to the issue of what to do with this long wall in my office—which is concrete block and really ugly—there wasn't a whole lot of any one tile. But as I've learned in quilting again and again, the smaller you cut stuff up, the more you can mix a lot of different stuff together.

We talked about this project for quite a while before he began. At first, Jay was inclined to break everything into small pieces and do the whole wall that way. But my work with scrap fabric has taught me that that is truly the long way around. Better to mix in some large pieces so you aren't completely insane by the time you reach the end.

So he chose five sets of large tiles, 2 sets of midsized tiles, and two sets of small tiles to keep whole. Those went up in a pattern first. Since then, he's been working with broken tiles to fill in the rest.

It has been long, at times quite tedious. But the result, as it emerges, is quite exquisite. This is where a portion of the wall was yesterday. I put a photo of part of this same wall—taken at the first of the year—at the bottom of this post for comparison.

Progress!

Oh Dat Pepé Le Pew

Last night, we ushered over in White River Junction for Northern Stage's production of THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard. I love Tom Stoppard's work (Shakespeare in Love is one of my favorite movies of all time) and as you would expect, this play was extraordinarily well-written.

The production was well acted but to be honest, the play's plot is somewhat inscrutable.

So why do I have an image of a Loony Tunes skunk here?

Because one of the very first signs of spring up here is driving through a patch of skunky miasma on a late winter evening. They are waking up, these black-and-white critters, and they perfume the air when they do.

This happened to us twice last night, in the space of seven miles.

Ooooh Pepé, welcome back to the Upper Valley!

Countdown to "Screes!" in the Trees

Late this summer, my family and I will have lived on this spot for 17 years, which is half of how long Jay and I have been together. So it's safe to say that we pretty much know the seasonal habits around here. Like where to look for the first yellowing trees in August, where the first wild leeks pop up down by the river, where the yellow violets grow and the trout lilies and the wild ginger.

And at this time of year, when the first redwing blackbirds cluster in those trees you can see along the road to the left. The earliest we've ever heard their "Screes!" in the trees is March 19. The latest is March 22. A narrow window, indeed, and a reassuring one.

Over the next three weeks, the landscape pictured here will change dramatically and I've always wanted to capture that in daily photographs. This is the year.

So we're waiting for the flocks to arrive. Their welcome noise is unmistakeable as they sit on the branches gossiping about their flight north and why don't they wait until April because Vermont's weather in March is always awful.

And those of us with ears to hear will exult.